A multi-channel audio signal can be captured using multiple microphones within common acoustic space or created in a synthetical manner by combining a number of possibly unrelated audio signals. A multi-channel audio signal may comprise any number of channels, common channel configurations are for example “traditional two-channel stereo”, 5.1 or 7.2 channel configurations commonly used in consumer electronics. Typically, coding of multi-channel audio signals at high-quality requires high bit-rate, which may not be feasible in all applications and operational scenarios.
An emerging new type of use case for audio capture and further processing is multiview audio, which is a concept that provides different aural views to an audio scene, from which (e.g.) a user can select the one he/she prefers.
In principle, “traditional” multi-channel audio can be seen as a subset of multiview audio, implying that generic multi-channel audio coding techniques may be applied to multiview audio to introduce relatively low bit-rates.